Firefox 4 beating IE9 in market share

Life

Firefox 4’s share shot up 11% the first day after Mozilla started offering users the upgrade last week, and climbed 30% in four days.

The boost moved a long-time Mozilla employee to compare the gains of Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) since the two browsers debuted last March.

According to Irish Web metrics company StatCounter, Firefox 4 usage share jumped from 10.3% to 11.4% on the day after Mozilla began asking existing users if they wanted to upgrade to the new edition.

By Monday, Firefox 4 accounted for 13.2% of all browsers, a 30% increase from the previous Thursday.

IE9’s progress has been slower: In the first four days after Microsoft turned on the Windows Update upgrade April 18, IE9’s share climbed by 20%. Since then the browser has gradually grown its share, breaking the 4% mark for the first time last weekend.

Microsoft and Mozilla have been skirmishing over browser share since the former launched IE9 March 14 and the later released Firefox 4 on March 22.

After Mozilla boasted of the early download tallies of Firefox 4 — 7.1 million the first day, 8.8 million the next day — Microsoft argued that the comparisons between the browsers were “premature at best, and misleading at worst” because IE9 had yet to hit Windows Update.

Microsoft has said that all IE7 and IE8 users on Windows Vista and Windows 7 will have seen the upgrade offer by the end of June.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Firefox 4 has a much larger share than IE9, even if Mozilla turned on its upgrade offer two weeks after Microsoft. Unlike IE9, which runs only on Windows Vista and Windows 7, Firefox also works on Windows XP, Mac and Linux.

IDG News Service

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